Rainy Day Reads

Challenges:   Bingo Board 2017: Read For Whom the Bell Tolls Around the Year in 52 Books: A banned book Me and Ernest just don’t get along. I feel like I’ve read or tried to read a bunch of his stuff, but it just isn’t for me. I put this book on my bingo board because I’ve been wanting to give him a second chance to woe me, seeing as he is considered a great writer of classic books. But no dice. I still didn’t like his writing… This book is about the Spanish civil war era and we follow a young idealistic American who has come to fight with the republicans. He is a dynamite expert (I’m sure there’s a fancy name for that?) and he is sent into the mountains to meet a small group of rebels who will help him blow up a bridge in preparation for a battle that is being planned.  He meets the rebels and honestly that’s as far as I got. I just could not stand the writing style. The dialogue was incredibly stilted and formal going something like this:  I...

I’ve heard a lot about this book and everyone who has read it has seemed to love it. It is about a woman who decides to become a vegetarian, which her entire family seems to have a massive problem with. We hear the story from the perspectives of her relatives instead of herself, so I found it pretty hard to connect with her.   First we hear from her husband. This is the period when she decides to become vegetarian. It not just the fact that she becomes vegetarian, she seems to have some sort of mental health issue in relation to this, but instead of being concerned about her mental health her husband is obsessed with the fact that she leaves the house without wearing a bra.  Next we hear from her brother-in-law. Now the woman seems to be in a mentally healthier state and she helps out with her brother-in-laws art project. This art project consists of him painting flowers on her naked body and filming it. This man is sexually obsessed with the woman and wants nothin...

I’ve been seeing videos on Top 5 Wednesday forever on Youtube, and I thought I would finally give it a go. This was created by Gingerreadslainey on Youtube, and there is a Goodreads group where you can keep updated on upcoming topics.  The topic for today is books you DNF’ed, i.e. books you didn’t finish. I’ve only recently started not finishing books, because of various reasons explained here , but I have managed to DNF a few books and here is my top 5. 5 - The Little Friend by Donna Tartt I tried to read this one because of all the good things I heard about Donna Tartt’s writing. And while I did enjoy the writing style, the pace was glacially slow. I read just under half of the book (283 pages to be exact) and nothing had really happened. I had learnt nothing that wasn’t in the blurb, and I lost my patience and gave it up.  4 - Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters This was a TBR jar pick and when I first started reading it, I really enjoyed...

I started this book because I had heard so many good things about Donna Tartt's other books, especially “The Secret History” and “Goldfinch”. But this one was the first that came to my library, so I figured this would be equally good.   I recently did a post on why I find it SO hard to give up on a book even though I don’t like it. I decided that life is too short to waste precious reading time on books you are not really enjoying, and this book will be the victim of that determination! I’ve read 283 pages, just short of the halfway mark, and I just can’t get into it. Aside from the main plot point nothing has really happened yet, and that is just FAR too slow-moving for me!  The book is about a family in the American South. The son of the family dies under mysterious circumstances and more than 10 years later his youngest sister decides to try and find out what really happened. And that is pretty much the synopsis and pretty much everything that has happened so far....